It is NOT about piracy, stupid!

Keeping this short and straight.

The blocks on the websites that happened recently, are not about controlling piracy, but about controlling the internet itself. If you look at the top popular sites where anyone can post content, you will see that increasingly, there are three kinds of sites. The first are those that have understandings on content removal with our government – think Google, Facebook, etc. The second are those whose access comes under threat – be it The Pirate Bay or pastebin. And of course, the third kind of site is the one directly or indirectly influenced by the government – news sites, for example.

In other words, if anything gets said that needs to be silent, the accessible part of the web can be forced into compliance one way or the other. Sites without such understandings either have to have content that will not bother the government or are at risk of being banned. If it were about piracy, it makes no sense to ban VIMEO, where there is very little pirated content, but keep access to YouTube, where you can get uploaded videos of just about every Hindi song ever – and by multiple users who are not the rights owners for those songs. Let alone other piracy. However, it makes sense when you factor in the fact that Google routinely takes down content on the demand of the government. It is an alarming worldwide trend. There are 250000 content removal requests on an average **per week* at Google. This is more than all of 2009. That is how rapidly censorship is growing.

It is less of censorship and more of control freakery. The government’s interest is in knowing that they can take down content that they want to silence efficiently. This content may or may not be pirated, as is clearly understood from the large number of content removal requests for political reasons from India. Of course, at that time the reason was offending religious sentiments – a small fraction of the actual removal requests. In various ways and for various reasons, the government is making sustained attacks on free speech.

Do the math.

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1 thought on “It is NOT about piracy, stupid!”

  1. DG assure la livraison numérique de la télévision traditionnelle et des spots tod’s ferrari radio, par lunettes de soleil ray ban opposition aux traditionnelles physique dub et les méthodes du bateau . L’transition seul est assez attrayante, à la fois la télévision et passer à la radio de technologies de distribution numérique. DG a égale bose ae2 m

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